Fewer Visual Studio Sign-in Prompts

You’ve told us that Visual Studio makes you sign in WAY too often. Over the last year, we’ve released several improvements to help address your feedback. The keychain we released with Visual Studio 2015 made it possible to manage multiple identities in VS and gave you single sign-on across the IDE. In the last few updates, we’ve made changes to core services like licensing and roaming, which allow you to refresh your license or roam your settings for up to a year or more without a prompt for credentials. We also updated the Windows store publishing features to use the keychain for single sign-on with the rest of the IDE. Still, if you developed against Azure using a Microsoft account (e.g. @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, or @live.com) as many of us with MSDN subscription credits do, Visual Studio prompted you to sign in every 12 hours to access Azure resources from the IDE.

We’re excited to share that we completed the deployment of some improvements that allow users to safely stay signed in and eliminate the forced sign-in every 12 hours. This addresses the most commonly reported sign-in issue . The next time you’re prompted to sign-in, Visual Studio will follow the new authentication flow that lets you stay signed into the IDE without reentering your credentials every 12 hours. This server-side fix is compatible with all Visual Studio versions that support Azure development back to VS 2012 though the improvements and bug fixes described above will give you the best results on the latest version.

Thank you to all the community members who have shared feedback to improve the identity experience in Visual Studio and, as always, we welcome all your comments. Please report any problems via theReport a Problem control in Visual Studio. If you have a suggestion, please create a post on UserVoice . Keep an eye out for more improvements to come in Visual Studio “15” and beyond.

John Montgomery , Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont

John is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.